maine web development, web design, internet marketing

Sorry I missed my weekly recap last week! I hope you didn’t feel totally in the dark! So this week some of the news will be from two weeks ago. Being sick in the summer is the worst isn’t it?

Here is the tech news I felt fit to tell you about from the last two weeks:

Facebook changing layout of fan pages, removing boxes – This is important if you are the administrator of a Facebook fan page! Facebook is changing the layout of their Facebook pages on August 23rd. If you have your page set up in boxes you need to take that content and move it to custom tabs. If you are the admin of a page, you should see an alert on the top of the page and the option to see what your page will look like when the changes take place (see below). The new width for custom pages will be 520px, which is significantly smaller than before.

Google Wave, Waves Goodbye – Google wave came out last year and while some loved it for its ability to collaborate on big projects, most were just annoyed with this product. Google announced that they are not going to be sinking any more resources into Google wave and it may eventually come down. The product “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google. For more information about the end of Google Wave check out TechCrunch’s post or you can read CNNs post on Why Google Wave’s demise is good news for Facebook.

Facebook makes browsing photos easier – Perhaps taking a page from Google’s revamped image searches, Facebook has redone how they display photos on profiles. In creepier news, they also added ‘face detection‘ to make tagging easier. I have seen this on my home screen of Facebook a few times in the last week and I was surprised. I get what they are trying to do but it has a hint of creepy, if you ask me.

Delta lets you buy airline tickets right from Facebook – As the lines from social media sites and business get blurred, this new feature from Delta shouldn’t be a surprise but it caught many of us off guard. As of this past week you can now purchase airline tickets right from Delta’s Facebook fan page.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta coming our September 15th – Microsoft will launch the public Beta of IE9 on September 15th. Internet Explorer has quickly lost power to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Will this new version pull them our of the mud? We will have to wait and see.

Links I liked:

• The numbers don’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs – CNN Money
• Connect Your B2B Customers with Social Media Profiles – socialmediab2b.com
• Are You Sure You Want That Social Media Job? – Brass Tack Thinking
• Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? – TopRank Blog
• 28 Awesome B2B Social Media Statistics – socialmediab2b.com
• The 4 Hottest Social Media Marketing Trends Explained – Hubspot

LinkedIn is a powerful business networking tool. If you are one of the many who have heard this before but still don’t “get it”, here is one way to utilize LinkedIn better so it fits into your work day.

Use an RSS Reader to stay on top of LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers are great! You can drill down into the topic your industry is in and find questions people are asking daily. Taking the time to answer some of these questions in and around your industry is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. As you answer questions it also shows up on your LinkedIn profile and in your network’s activity stream. Letting people know you are the go-to in an industry leads to referrals and business.

Many of us are not on LinkedIn all day though. So by the time you remember to check LinkedIn Answers, there are too many to sort through and if you did answer one, you might be the 50th person to give your opinion and it gets lost in the noise.

By subscribing to LinkedIn in your RSS reader you can scan through Questions as they come in. Using a more central location like your RSS reader makes it more timely, easier to scan and alleviates the need to log into LinkedIn multiple times.

Below is a video showing you how you can quickly subscribe to a LinkedIn topic that interests you:

Not a video person? Here is how you subscribe to LinkedIn Answers

• Go to LinkedIn Answers you can either follow this link or pull down the More menu on the LinkedIn Navigation to get there.
• On the right hand side, browse and select a category that interests you.
• If possible, go back to the browse category and drill down to a more specific topic.
• At the bottom of the browse section, click on the Subscribe to new questions in: link.
• Choose your preferred RSS reader

Oh competitors… you can’t live with them and you can’t wish them away to a magical land far, far away. We all have competitors in our jobs and in our life. It is a part of life.

We could drown keeping a constant eye on what our competitors are doing. We could also veer away from what it is we do best trying to keep up with them, we could add services we don’t excel at, we could lose our focus.

Trust me… I could spend all day, every day online gasping, complaining and whining about what other people in my industry are doing, but who does that really help? Not me. What many of us need to do is think back to our school days when Ms. Ross would say ‘Amanda keep your eyes on your OWN paper’ but maybe you didn’t have Ms. Ross (lucky) and maybe your name isn’t Amanda.

Match your competitors but don’t follow them – Something makes you unique from even your closest competitor. Is it customer service, like Zappos? Is it that your employees are more dedicated? Do you have a unique software? Whatever it is, recognize that your differences are also your strengths. If you spend all your time watching what your competitor is doing and then following them, soon you will be way off the path you started on. Sure, you can be as good as them at some things, but be better at the things that make you unique.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going,
because you may not get there. – Yogi Berra

Use proper ‘Netiquette’ when interacting with your shared space online – With sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it can seem impossible to ignore what other people are doing. When you do stumble across a blog, interview, post or update that irks you, it is usually best to leave it alone. If there is something posted about your company or service, you should consult your social media policy on how to handle reactions to content.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. – Lou Holtz

Focus on what people are saying about you, not about them – Trust me, I know how frustrating it can be to see other people talking about your competitor and not about you. Jumping in on the conversation can be tacky though. Pay more attention to what people are saying about you and react and reward them as necessary. Set up things like Google Alerts to get notified when your company is mentioned. Social networking sites got you down? Tired of seeing your competition being tweeted about and to? Here is one thing I have learned – sometimes some people are better at Twitter than they are at business. Ignore it and focus on what cool things you have going on instead. Do you have a Twitter account? Take a minute to review the ‘Lists‘ people have categorized you under. I think Twitter lists are a great dipstick to see how people view your content.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope. – Josh Billings

Measure against yourself and your goals – We need to stop upholding ourselves to other people’s expectations. We need to measure our own success against ourselves first. I recently read a great blog post, Run Your Own Race, that really ironed this out for me. As many of you know, I recently became a “runner”. My first goal was a half marathon. I run very slow because I never want to run out of gas by mile 6 or 12. I felt pressure to run faster because whenever you tell someone you ran a race they ask ‘what was your time?’ It took me until just recently to not care about telling people my time. I am running these races for my health, to spend time with friends and mostly, so I don’t go insane. It doesn’t matter how fast. It just matters that I am doing it. The same goes for my work. I measure the things that are important to reaching Hall’s goals. Not just measuring all the things that we are able to measure.

If you’re looking sideways all the time, you’re very likely to miss the opportunities, paths, and people that are right in front of you. – Amber Naslund, Brass Tack Thinking

It is a big world out there. We should all be able to coexist, but too often I see people who are obsessed with what their competition is doing. Remember the things that make you different and focus on those. By keeping your eyes on your own paper you will find opportunities that are inline with your strengths and goals. By copying the other guy, you are straying from what it is you have set out to do. Know what makes your competitors different from you as well. It may not hurt to recognize what they flourish in too and if there is a project that is better suited for them, are you comfortable enough to hand it off to them?

When a business has a CMS website, often times updating it goes to the bottom of a to-do list. Trust me, I know that work can get busy and some things just are not as important as others. However, it is important to keep your site updated with fresh content for many reasons. Updating content on your website does not have to be a chore though, a few quick updates every so often can really make a difference! Sitepoint published a blog post recently with “5 Quick Ways to Freshen Up Your Web Site Copy” and I would like to expand on that with some B2B specific actions that you can do to add value to your website.

Photo Credit: Erica_Marshall

1. Update Information About Your Company and Employees
The first point the article mentions is to update your Bio. In addition to making sure your bio has the most recent information (including awards and presentations) make sure to check your company bio and employee bios as well. The About Us page is one of the most visited pages on a website and is important in B2B for validating your organization and showing that there are real people behind the scenes. It is crucial to make sure that the information about your company is always up to date and that the employee list is current and everyone has the correct titles.

2. Social Media Feed
If your company is active on Twitter or Facebook, then a feed of the most recent tweets and posts can be a great addition to a site if they are updated frequently. A feed that shows the last action being a month ago will not help your site since people will think that you gave up and are not putting forth the effort online anymore. However, an active feed will provide great fresh content to your website while showing your personality (people love to know that other people are behind the site, even B2Bs!).

3. Review Your Products and Services
When other businesses and clients come to your site they want to know the bottom line: what you have that will fill their need. It will make your company look bad if you do not have the most up to date information. Always keep a current list of products and services so that you are not stuck defending something that is incorrectly presented.

4. Review Action Items on High Traffic Pages
Take a look at your analytics (if you do not have any, set it up stat!) and see what pages are the most popular. Now think about what you have for action items on those pages. Any? Think of what you would like your visitors to do once they have viewed those pages and make it easy for them to follow through with that action! Add links to contact you or to view more information. Think of what information you would be looking for if you were visiting and provide that. Then set up goals so that you can see what is working and if visitors are converting.

5. Review Pages with Low Traffic and Take Appropriate Action
While looking at your analytics also take some time to see what pages are getting the least amount of traffic. Are those pages essential? Cut them if they are not. If they do have important information but no visits then maybe the pages are too hard to find. Review your navigation and make sure it is easy to get to the information people need. Finally, review the content and see if there is anything you can do to spice it up or trim it down so that it provides just what visitors want once they get there!

These are just a few things you can do to make sure that your website gives the right impression to your B2B visitors. Clients and prospects have more trust in a company that has an up to date website with expert information and the most recent resources. Your website is the hub of your online brand, so treat it well!